China opens world’s biggest movie hub to woo Hollywood
Four gigantic Chinese characters are aligned on a hill overlooking a seaside film studio complex, in a nod to the fabled Hollywood sign in Los Angeles.
Except this is northern China’s port city of Qingdao, where Dalian Wanda Group, a real-estate, retail and entertainment conglomerate, is opening its doors to an audacious 50 billion yuan (NZ$11.2b) world-class film production hub, called the Oriental Movie Metropolis, or Dong Fang Ying Du.
The project boasts the world’s largest studios, a commercial complex covered with giant portraits of Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe and Bruce Lee. There’s also a reclaimed island full of hotels, condos, two theatres and a yacht club.
It all adds up to China’s largest and glitziest effort yet to attract Hollywood film-makers to work their magic using domestic filmproduction studios – the sort of move that can enhance the nation’s ‘‘soft power’’ and cultural reache. For Wanda’s billionaire chairman Wang Jianlin, who has dialled back his ambitions to build an entertainment empire thanks to debt pressure, a lot is riding on the success of the complex.
At the weekend, executives from major studios in Hollywood and China came to Qingdao, a city best known for its namesake beer, for the opening ceremony. It comes as the Beijing-based conglomerate has seen its debtfuelled, global shopping spree curtailed by the Chinese government.
As Wang, 63, presided over the festivities, he said it will become a new hub for global film making.
Making the complex a global magnet for film-making will be a challenge, according to Sun Hengqin, chief president assistant of Wanda Film Group and the head of the movie metropolis.
‘‘We have yet to figure out a clear strategy to attract Hollywood and other foreign filmmakers,’’ Sun said. ‘‘Yes, we’d love them to come and shoot their films here, and we will study what are the factors that prevent them from coming and improve our services accordingly.’’
The studios have been partially open since the second half of 2016 and have hosted the production of 10 films. Other than Wanda’s Legendary Entertainment, no big Hollywood studio has produced a movie in Qingdao. Most of the productions have been Chinese films, albeit some of them with big budgets, such as Feng Shen, a 3 billion yuan trilogy based on an ancient Chinese mythological novel.
‘‘We plan to position ourselves first for the domestic market before going overseas,’’ said Sun, a former local government official. Feng Shen, he said, will occupy half of the studios’ 30 sound stages for the next two years and that five to six other Chinese films have committed to using the facility this year.
The entire complex spans 376 hectares, according to a Wanda statement in 2013, when the project broke ground with Hollywood glitterati such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Nicole Kidman and now-disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein.